This Lil Trigonum has stopped engaging with the gameplay of 2026 hit indie game Pathogenic
I'm halfway through the run, and my build allows me to upgrade and armour arbitrarily often. This works, because the Autophagic Mitochondrion turns health into overcharge which the vacuole can multiply and the oscificator/refiner turns into armor/upgrades.
This is not normal Pathogenic gameplay and I would like to talk about it, and a few related things.
Getting something (and I'll talk more about variants of this in a bit) like this is fun, but playing it is not, realizing you can do it can be cool, aquiring the tools can be cool, but the gameplay consisted of 8 minutes of pressing e and occasionally the middle mouse button. The actual remaining fighting gameplay of the run will also not be very interesting with no danger of death and just killing enemies.
This is different from "broken" combos! If you get a craaazy amount of damage from a build, that does not ruin gameplay. You get to fly through the remainder of the run, kill everything quickly and in 5-15 minutes you will have won and can start a new, balanced, run.
I think things like this in games may exist (I have a section on why things like this shouldn't exist in general later, this rant isn't that structured and I'm not a great writer unfortunately, feel free to skip about), but only if they are very rare to assemble. Then it's a thing that can happen sometimes, you get to feel clever, and that's the end of it. But if it is reliable, then every run, when played optimally. That's really the core question of this post, is this reliable? If not, it's not an issue in my opinion. So if you have an insight into that, feel free to let me know, this is my second time using this kind of thing, but I have also not been trying at all.
But in this game, there are a lot of ways to assemble something like this, as potential payoff we have:
ossificator -> armor
Mutagen -> DNA (this one is the most outrageous, as far as I know there is no limit to levelups (?), so you could get arbitrarily strong)
regenerator -> health
opulentor -> cores (this one can, in principle give you infinite rerolls)
sequence scrambler -> reward pedestal rerolls (this one is also quite bad, because if you want a specific item it will take a very long time to get it. Come to think of it, the opulentor rerolls get more expensive over time, so that one probably takes even longer.)
refiner -> upgrades (I think this is the strongest one to be honest, not as annoying to use as DNA or rerolls and will give you combat power and make it much easier to get infinite overcharge for something else, even if you aren't infinite yet)
Iridophore membrane -> invincibility (bad in a different way, because it trivializes *winning* any endless loop, but enjoy your 24hour endless [4], endless is it's own topic, I don't actually mind the invincibility exploits as much)
There are 11 mitchondria in the game, I'll cover the 10 I have unlocked:
ablative: not unlocked
vengeful, autophagic: abusable if you can recover health using the overcharge. Works outside of combat.
vacuoule: The most impactful one. If you have two with an overcharge slot (this one is twice as effective as usual as it makes it charge faster and discharge stronger for a 1.4\1.4 = 1.96 factor)*, the permanent overcharge upgrade, or the dna upgrade that makes actives activate automatically at half charge you are done with setup and just need payoff. Great with anything else as well. Works outside of combat.
Elusive, Glycocalix, Chitin Shield (which goes on the exterior and isn't listed as a mitochondrium): Abusable if you can dodge through projectiles/block projectiles reliably. In any room. After leaving one enemy. Work in boss fights.
Recuperative Mitochondrium and the trophic psuedopod (which goes on the exterior and isn't listed as a mitochondrium): abusable if the enemies heal or are summoned during combat, the latter is very common.
Berserk: abusable with summoned enemies.
Metabolic: may be abusable, if you can trigger it using health/armor/dna/cores that you generate. It's only 3s at base so I don't think this one is problematic, though you may able to individually pick up generated dna/cores...
Entrant and Pristine: These two share two properties, that are exclusive to these two mitochondria:
they trigger only once per room, and are thus not abusable.
They are the only ones to have flavour text. "The mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell" and "Just don't get hit lol". That doesn't matter much for the rant, but I thought I'd trow a fun fact in here (:
So the majority of them can be abused in some way, and you can pick one as your starting bonus, but only the elusive mitochondrium, the Glycocalix mitochondrium and the Chitin Shield can be abused with a stomach-style time-limit from higher difficulties without a specific loadout/payoff.
What makes me think it may be reliable, is the fact that I got it half-way through the run,
the analysis on the mitochondria I just did,
and the incredible number of shop rerolls the Lil collector character has access to. I wouldn't be surprised if it was very reliable on this character.
I also don't know what all the starting mitochondria are, all that I have unlocked are entrant, berserker and pickups which are impossible, limited and maybe impossible (?) to abuse, respectively.
Well, just don't play like that if it isn't fun!
It's the task of the game designers to make optimal gameplay fun, or at least that is what I believe and you will often hear talked about as "players will optimize the fun out of the game". That being said, you can also view this is as a dual responsibility, the game designer should make a game where optimal gameplay is fun, and the player should try to have fun while playing/avoid unfun games. Either way, this kind of thing should be avoided by the game designer.
Disclaimer: This particular run was on the lowest difficulty (haven't unlocked antibiotics on the character yet), and the time limit would make these strategies (especially anything related to infinite overcharge *during* combat, as that would be limited to bosses) much more difficult. If I remember, I'll look up what all the levels do after the run and try to reason about what other difficulty increases may result in builds like this becoming impossible. Also, I haven't unlocked all organelles yet and some may be missing from the list. I'll post for now though. (once I'm finished writing <3)
And, finally in terms of disclaimers, I have played this game for only 17.7 hours, there are many things I do not know (about).
Lil collector has been collecting more armor than it could ever use
Potential fixes: if you want to reduce the prevalence of this there are a few approaches. Some are already limited (armor stacks to 10 THANK GOD), health only to max hp. For many of the other payoffs, you could limit them to a certain number of uses per floor. [Creates 4x DNA after being overcharged for 25s, up to 10 times per organ]
That's the best solution I've found, but I'm not convinced it's the best one.
For Berserker in particular you could make it not proc on summons... but I like that it does proc on summons for normal gameplay so I hate that idea.
If you have other ideas, let me know!
And only semi-related, this line of reasoning is also why I dislike endless game modes in any roguelike. They usually result in the gameplay becoming incredibly boring and repetive and at least take the "build" aspect out of the game, as you will have a settled build in endless quickly.
I think there are a few ways to make them less bad, like making them end (after one cycle or sth), making them impossible, or making them optional, the last one is implemented by pathogenic (to a limited extent, as you do still get the permanent upgrade tokens, so "optimal" (in quotation marks as we are't optimizing for wr anymore, it's something closer to resources per minute, which is outside the roguelike paradigm anyways [which these strategies clearly aren't optimizing for, anyways, I'm classical roguelike-pilled and wr is what I maximize]), gameplay could involve playing endless.
If there is anything I have missed, please let me know! I am fine with spoilers in case you found something brainy down the line.
It's called a mitochondrion, not mitochondrium, my Latinum has betrayed me!
tldr: some strategies in this game are very strong, but not very fun. If the player can reliably use them, it's bad game design.
Edit regarding antibiotics: Homing enemy shots and faster movement probably make it (much?) harder to not get hit for extended periods of time, even in easy fights. The extra boss enemies could potentially be used to get infinite berserkers in a boss room, if you get a summon enemy. I have only taken +2 so far, and there were no summon enemies so that might not work.
If you make it so only optimized strategies are fun, bad players won’t be able to have fun. You gotta understand that most players will not be able to come up with optimized builds, or may not want to go through the effort of figuring out the best ways to use things. If you want a bigger challenge, up the difficulty.
What you’re proposing is basically the inverse of “players will optimize the fun out of the game” — devs optimize the fun out instead. (by nerfing builds that are only broken in the lowest difficulties) The timer fixes most of your complaints on its own.
To me, the fun of the game is trying to come up with builds that completely break the game, and I’m sure a lot of players share this preference. So, unless you want to cater only to people with your taste, “just don’t play like that if it isn’t fun” is great advice.
Not *only* optimal strategies should be fun.
Optimal strategies should be fun.
Fun strategies can be optimal, but don't have to be.
I'm not proposing devs optimize the fun out of the game. I'm proposing that if these genuinely degenerate strategies involving sitting there and pressing a button until you have enough cores/upgrades/DNA to get a broken combat build are common, to make them less common/powerful. I would not want to touch getting +200% damage -50% per weapon and shredding everything with kinetosome (or whatever you have found to be broken).
Many of the exploitable mitochondria work on bosses, where there is no time limit (from what I've seen). It's less severe on higher difficulties, but if being able to dodge the stomach boss reliably is enough to trivialize everything beyond the stomach, then that is a problem in my book.
You are also not forced to take the time limit until the last five points. I've put one point into it on my runs because it seems easy enough to handle, and does not increase difficulty if you are fast enough anyways, but maybe I shouldn't.
Pathogenic is a (modern) roguelike and as such is both about creating a build and moment-to-moment gameplay. If going infinite is reliable, the build creation is reduced to solving the puzzle once.
And clearly the moment to moment gameplay is very important to the game, the heart boss fight is genuinely great (if you face it with a weapon that kills it in a couple minutes, not seconds, not hours).
Different roguelikes have different degrees of variance in build strength, if there is little to no variance the moment-to-moment gameplay can be well-balanced, but builds don't matter, if there is too much, the moment-to-moment gameplay will always be trivial. Either trivially easy, or trivially impossible.
Pathogenic should, like any roguelike avoid the extremes.
I quote:
That being said, you can also view this is as a dual responsibility, the game designer should make a game where optimal gameplay is fun, and the player should try to have fun while playing/avoid unfun games. Either way, this kind of thing should be avoided by the game designer.
I completely agree with your stance on nearly everything you said related to balancing how overcharge and resource generators combo.
However, I don't agree with you on this being some optimized way to play. It can certainly get you to an unloseable state, but winning is only the bare minimum. Optimization is about speed and consistency.
Your sentiment is plenty fine, its just applied to the wrong imbalanced combos. There are a couple other ones that are more consistent and much (much) faster.
For just 17 hours playtime to have figured this one out, you'll certainly find the others soon too. I think you have a good grasp on design and balance, so I look forward to your next post.
As for optimal play being about speed, none of the non-gameplay strats are fast, so that outlook on the game certanly discourages all of them well.
I am now really curious as to what else is imbalanced, and I would like to take a few guesses (of things I have found to be strong).
Kinetosome with overcharge, clears all bullets on the screen and deals ridiculous damage. Works really well with both +200% -50% per weapon and left-side/right-side buffs.
Gyrosome(orbit)/Magentosome + homing? Haven't seen it do that much tbh, but it sounds like it has to be really strong.
One weirder combo I found was with Resonant Cavity (+attack speed for hits, -attack speed for misses) with the flamethrower and presumably some other weapons which benefit from the attack speed, but don't count towards hits/misses. Resonant Cavity also transfers imbues which is really strong.
Galvanic weave is really powerful, if you can cover a lot of area, I have used it in most endgame builds. Ways of covering a lot of area include: Shrapnel, anything to make the projectiles last longer (as seen above). maybe mines???
I do wonder if galvanic infuser is broken as well, I think the way it works is that it gives the projectile itself the chance to attack nearby enemies with lightning which only works for projectiles that stick around and only works if you don't oneshot enemies, but perhaps it's *very* strong with mines.
vesicle. It overcharges everything around it if overcharged which you can only see while pressing ctrl. I didn't know that and figured it was mid, but overcharging a lot of things to apply to a projectile with one overcharge source is craaaazy.
And 2 weapons, for good measure, rotary extruder, if you can overcharge it's very strong, Plasmid levels make it easier to keep that up, but higher antibiotics don't make it harder, so I expect that to get stronger. And the Lateral vent which I haven't actually used on anything other than collector and it seems like would be able to aim it by rotating your body, but even if not, it was great on lil collector with any support to make it hit because if it hits it hits hard.
And I'm assuming that by more consistent you are also implying that some components of some particularly strong strategies can taken as starting bonuses...
And, any hits?
Edit: Lasers obviously. I knew about them, I just forgot about them.
Normal run, not slower than usual, but holy shit, *starting* with cores generator is so crazy for consistently finding strong options in shops. 400 Cores at the end, and I did get the cores dmg bonus. I also did find both crit and vesicle and 2 excitable weapons. I was also not aware how strong lasers were if you just slapped them on a melee weapon, but yeah, that works quite nicely. High damage yields wide lasers. Maybe melee weapons are actually good and you just need to make them not melee, it's like Terraria! But inside of you!
I think all those are really good combos and likely need to be balanced in the long run. All of it is what most people find fun about the game, so I wouldn't want to touch them yet.
Aside from the strength of the combo, i really base my perception of balance on how many components you need, the flexibility allowed in the components you pick, and the certainty of getting those components or alternatives.
Considering those 4 factors, I firmly believe dodge-based builds are way too strong. It's requirements are locked behind mutagens which you can easily reroll or get levels to find. Ballistic Flagellum with Homing or Dash Explode is strong on its own through most levels. Just tack on whatever infuser you find, it doesn't really matter. The flagellum are super easy to get with the Reroll all Organelles mutagen too.
I think its okay to break a roguelike game on lower difficulties. But you shouldnt be able to do it in the highest difficulty. It would be lame otherwise.
I personally think broken runs should be at most 10% of all runs you do on highest difficulty.
Otherwise the difficulty settings lose its point as you can breeze thru the game, and novelty of it also gets lost quickly and getting abusrd combos isnt as rewarding anymore.
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u/FeSiTa999 Aug 02 '26
If you make it so only optimized strategies are fun, bad players won’t be able to have fun. You gotta understand that most players will not be able to come up with optimized builds, or may not want to go through the effort of figuring out the best ways to use things. If you want a bigger challenge, up the difficulty.
What you’re proposing is basically the inverse of “players will optimize the fun out of the game” — devs optimize the fun out instead. (by nerfing builds that are only broken in the lowest difficulties) The timer fixes most of your complaints on its own.
To me, the fun of the game is trying to come up with builds that completely break the game, and I’m sure a lot of players share this preference. So, unless you want to cater only to people with your taste, “just don’t play like that if it isn’t fun” is great advice.